Our perception of colors may be influenced by our sense of smell, according to a new study from Liverpool John Moores University.
- Crossmodal associations occur when people make unconscious but stereotypical correspondences between two or more senses.
- It is a mechanism of the brain to quickly and efficiently process all the information and sensations it receives.
- Researchers have shown that these unconscious cross-modal associations with our sense of smell can affect our perception of colors.
Sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell… Our five senses flood our brains with constant information. To be able to quickly process and make sense of all this data, it combines these sensations and creates associations.crossmodal” unconscious. For example, we conflate high temperatures and warm colors or the taste of lemon and yellow. According to work from Liverpool John Moores University published in the journal Frontiers in Psychologyassociations with smell are powerful enough to distort our perception of colors.
Color perception: the smell of coffee makes you see red
The team tested the existence and strength of odor-color associations in 24 adults aged 20 to 57. Participants were seated in front of a screen in a room free of unwanted sensory stimuli. To avoid disrupting their sense of smell, they were not to wear deodorant or perfume. As they looked at a colored square on the screen, a random smell among caramel, cherry, coffee, lemon, peppermint and that of odorless water (control element) was broadcast in the room for five minutes.
Volunteers then had to manually adjust the color of the square so that it appeared gray. “In a previous study, we showed that the smell of caramel generally constitutes a crossmodal association with dark brown and yellow, just like coffee with dark brown and red, cherry with pink, red and purple, peppermint with green and blue, and lemon with yellow, green and pink”specifies Dr Ryan Ward, lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, in a communicated.
The analysis of the data shows that the participants’ perception was disturbed by these associations crossmodal. They tended to adjust the color sliders incorrectly when a certain odor was present. For example, when they smelled coffee, they perceived the gray to be more reddish-brown than its true color. Similarly, when exposed to the scent of caramel, they wrongly perceived a color enriched with yellow as gray.
“These results show that the perception of gray tended towards the anticipated intermodal correspondences for four out of five scents, namely lemon, caramel, cherry and coffee”adds the expert. The exception was the peppermint smell. The choice of shade of the participants turned out to be different from the association crossmodal typical demonstrated with this flavor.
Association unconscious crossmodality: they influence our perceptions
“This “overcompensation” (from the Association crossmodal unconscious) suggests that the role of associations made in processing sensory input is strong enough to influence how we perceive information from different senses, here between smells and colors“concludes Dr. Ryan Ward.
The British scientists acknowledge that while their work has shed light on the complex interaction between the senses, further research is needed to better understand the mechanisms at play and their limitations.